Two programmes show the right and the wrong ways to revive an old idea

<strong>Oz and James D

My big prediction for television in 2009: there will be lots of programmes about recycling, and lots of recycling in general. In fact, it has already begun, and that's even before Kirstie Allsopp starts telling us how to make a bar of soap from carefully harvested earwax and an ancient bottle of something icky by Davidoff (the Channel 4 presenter will front a show about crafts later this year). On Tuesday, for instance, the BBC treated us to Oz and James Drink to Britain (6 January, 8pm). This is not precisely a repeat - technically the series is new - but it is a simple rehashing of an idea that the presenters have already dished up to us twice before. First, Oz Clarke and James May went to France to bicker about booze. Then they went to California to bicker about it. Now, they are travelling Britain doing it. I hate them both, and I hate their pathetic, contrived, patronising, clichéd, unfunny travelogues.

May, the Top Gear presenter, pretends to be a moron, and Clarke, the wine writer, pretends to be an effete twat (how far are they pretending?) and together they make drink-related "discoveries". In the case of Oz and James Drink to Britain, these predictable unearthings mostly involve the joys of real ales, of which there are (surprise) very many in these sceptred isles, though there is also always a moment when, on the road, they make some other kind of discovery. For the purposes of our entertainment, the two are living in extremely close proximity for the duration of this trip, and thus the eye of the camera will inevitably fall on the hilarious sight of, say, Clarke's underpants, curled like a sleeping cat on the floor of their tiny and very rubbish caravan. (I keep looking out for May's hairdryer, but no joy so far.)

Whoever conceived this aberration (some agent?) clearly meant for Clarke and May to play that hoary comedy standby, the odd couple. In reality, they are dreadfully alike, all compacted bachelor tics and giant, swinging egos. The only way I could endure part one - in which they drove north - was by hoping that some fine, pissed Yorkshireman would take exception and push over their silly doll's house of a caravan with them in it. Or worse.

This past week, the BBC also screened a new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank in five half-hour episodes (5-9 January, 7pm). It was wonderful: a triumph of casting. The danger with adapting the diary is that writers and actors alike make the cast of characters too sympathetic, rather than letting us see them through Anne's eyes. It is perfectly understandable why they might make this mistake - these were real people, after all, murdered in the worst crime of the 20th century - but to do so is to miss the point. They drove Anne nuts, and thus they were the moving spirits behind her writing: its animators, if you like.

In Deborah Moggach's version, everyone in the secret annexe was allowed to be horribly irritating - and thus doubly human. Lesley Sharp played "Petronella van Daan" (she, her lumpish husband, Hermann - played brilliantly by Ron Cook - and their doe-eyed son, Peter, shared the Franks' hiding place) as triumphantly brassy, like a market stallholder who once spotted a Vermeer during a house clearance. Tamsin Greig, more bravely, made Mrs Frank so numbly long-suffering that you could almost feel her sighs blowing against your cheeks; certainly, you knew exactly why her daughter found her so maddening: "Father says I should be nicer to her, but sometimes I want to slap her across the face." Best of all, Ellie Kendrick filled Anne with an energy so at odds with her situation as a prisoner of just 500 square feet of airless space that a part of me could never - not even in the final 20 minutes - believe she was going to die.

Before this adaptation began, I read a couple of previews which suggested that another retelling of Anne's story, however finely done, was somehow unnecessary. This is wrong. It will always come to someone, somewhere, as startlingly new, especially if they are young, and for the rest of us, it can always be made more vital. We can wonder at it all over again. We can remember.